Where is the National Roads Strategy?
So we’ve had a bus strategy, and a rail strategy, and a walking and cycling strategy.
Probably we can live without canals, but there still seems to be a major mode missing. What is it? Let’s think. Ah, I know: the one that accounts for the majority of trips in this country: roads.
This matters because the other strategies have big plans for roads. Gear Change, the bike strategy, promises “radical change” in road priority from cars to bikes. It says that local authorities will get no central funding for schemes that don’t improve bike provision, while it also promises to create thousands of miles of bike lanes. The Statutory Guidance that was issued last year is explicit that local authorities:
should take measures to reallocate road space to people walking and cycling
Meanwhile, Bus Back Better, the bus strategy, is explicit that any road with congestion and space should have a bus lane added.
These are transformational promises that will have a dramatic effect on the road network.
But, of course, roads people don’t always read bus or bike strategies; they read road strategies.
So during the flurry of strategising that we’ve seen recently, what has come out about roads?
Highways England
Well, from Highways England, we’ve had their 2020-5 Strategic Business Plan.
Despite the remarkable, sweeping ambitions contained in both the bus and bike strategies, the Highways England business plan is rather more muted. The word “bus” appears just once, with this anodyne and meaningless statement:
We will work in local, regional and national partnerships to support bus and coach companies in offering efficient, attractive services.
There is no hint of specifics or funding to support this vague intent.
Meanwhile, the only commitment on biking is to add a cycle lane from Girton to Cambridge. Should you wish to use a bike or a bus on any other part of the national highways network, you’re going to be on your own - at least for the next five years.
So if the bits of the Highways network that the Government controls directly aren’t going to be supporting the Government’s intentions, what about the bits controlled by local authorities?
Councils
Well, councils certainly have had something to work with. The statutory guidance to accompany the Traffic Management Act of 2004 has been updated to make sweeping pledges for bike priority. If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth reading these guidance as they are truly breathtaking in their scale and scope. You get a sense from this line:
The government therefore expects local authorities to make significant changes to their road layouts to give more space to cyclists and pedestrians.
But it goes into a lot more detail. If even a quarter of it was implemented, our cities would be transformed.
But this guidance just landed on the desks of local highways engineers without any context.
Within a few months, the bus strategy came out, and this also promised new statutory guidance - but this time to prioritise buses.
There are plenty of roads wide enough for a bus lane or a bike lane. Which one should be prioritised? Or, as the bike strategy (but not the bus strategy) suggests, should some of these roads be closed to cars and turned into exclusively bike and bus corridors?
The statutory guidance is almost so sweeping that it loses credibility. Especially as the Government has not always backed up its guidance with action - especially when faced with non-compliance by its own councils.
Kensington & Chelsea abided by the guidance and placed a new bike lane in Kensington High Street. That particular road is easily wide enough and the lane worked well.
But just seven weeks after spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money putting the lane in, the council spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money taking it out. The apparent reason was that actor Nigel Havers didn’t like it; certainly, polls undertaken by reputable pollsters showed a strong level of local support.
Grant Shapps was remarkably quiet about this breach of the statutory guidance issued by his department by a council controlled by his own party.
But it’s also fair to say that local authorities have not been given a wider strategy that sets the guidance into its wider context.
Context needed
Those of us that have managed teams know that it is best practice to explain goals and objectives, not just issue instructions.
That’s especially true when fundamental change is involved.
Highways engineers have been working to a consensus for many decades that their primary purpose is to facilitate the free-flow of traffic. The statutory guidance changes this and the bus strategy promises that their network management duty will be updated to make bus reliability a central pillar.
The problem is that the Government is fundamentally changing the role of roads through strategies designed for, and about, other modes. Within a year, we’re also likely to have clarity on the Government’s position on e-scooters, which will also have significant highways management implications.
As well as creating conflict between those strategies, it also doesn’t provide the overall strategic context needed to achieve the fundamental change in network management behaviours needed to deliver the other strategies.
If the Government is to achieve its goals for buses and bikes (and I really hope that it does) then highways engineers are going to have to accept that free-flowing car traffic is not only not the goal but actually the opposite. A stationary car next to a free-flowing bus and bike lane is the perfect incentive not to use the car. They are going to have to accept that the well-researched principle of induced demand (more roads creates more traffic and doesn’t reduce congestion) is actually true. And the Government is going to have to decide what it wants and not allocate the same road space twice to different modes in different stategies.
Obviously, the roads strategy also needs to deal with the impending crisis in taxation that will incentivise car use at the expense of public transport. And - I would strongly argue - set the scene for the national road pricing initiative that is now inevitable if Britain is to meet its climate obligations.
Time for a National Roads Strategy!
